Live For This Moment
by TechnicolorNina
Summary: Being a dragon can have some . . . interesting consequences when married, especially where intimate life is concerned. Jyuudai/Yubel. Eighth in the All That We Are series.


**Title**: Live For This Moment  
**Series**: All That We Are  
**Author**: Nina/**TechnicolorNina**  
**Fandom**: Yu-Gi-Oh!: GX  
**Pairing/Characters**: Yubel/Jyuudai  
**Word Count**: 4 042  
**Spoilers:** Third season.  
**Story Rating**: R  
**Story Summary**: Being a dragon presents its own unique challenges when it comes to daily life . . . and being married.  
**Notes**: Erm, warning for some rather vague half-dragon/half-human x human sex?  
**Feedback**: There may be something out there that's better than a review containing concrit, but if there is, I haven't found it yet. So if you have two minutes and you wouldn't mind? Please? Arigatou. (And concrit is cool. Flames are not.)  
**Special Thanks/Dedications**: For **Higuchimon**, who I was kind of not exactly racing.

* * *

_Touch me (all silent), all silent  
(Baby just tell me) Tell me please, all is forgiven (touch)  
Consume my wine, consume my mind  
I'll tell you how (where I go where I go) the winds sigh  
Touch me (just try it), just try it  
(Now that's it) Now there, that's it, oh god  
(god there that's heaven, touch)  
(I'll love you right) Oh, I'll love you right  
We'll wander down (wander down, where the sins lie) where the sins cry_

-- "Touch Me," Spring Awakening

_Looking in your eyes tonight  
I can see everything I need  
Holding your heart close to mine  
Feeling you, breathing you, my love_

-- "Body to Body, Heart to Heart," Cher

* * *

It starts with an itch.

Not even an _itch_, really; more of a tingle along the ends of her nerves, the kind of thing she felt as a human girl when a storm was brewing. Indeed, the first thing she does is to look to the sky, but although the late-summer rains appear as darkened clouds far off on the horizon, she sees none of the heavy black thunderheads that would signal thunder and lightning.

Still, there is that tingle along her spine, spreading across the flanges of her wings and then _down_ until they twitch, circling her wrists and creeping up her arms. She can feel it in the fronts of her feet when she walks.

She deals with it as she has dealt with the pain of the last year and a half: by ignoring it. She wakes in the morning and draws on the leather clothing Jyuudai's mother has been kind enough to help her make, ties on her blades overtop, wakes Jyuudai to help him wash and dress and prepare for his day. She follows him on his daily round so quietly that most people fail to even notice her, a princess dressed not for the throne but for battle, and when she leaves him with his parents (or sometimes a trusted guard) to let Xaquirah and his group of apprentices poke and prod at her in the most undignified of ways, nobody—except, perhaps, Jyuudai himself—notices her departure. At night she settles—not into the bed, the bed seems somehow too close now in a way she cannot explain to anyone, least of all herself—but into a pile of clean blankets and furs beneath, the empty side of the bed she cannot bring herself to lie in seeming to mock her.

Even when she sleeps the itch does not subside; she can feel it rubbing along the edges of her dreams, tinting them a warm and hazy red. One night Jyuudai opts to join her in the nest she has only recently built beneath their bed, and she spends the next day fighting not to let him see the exhaustion of a night spent wide awake with that itch screaming its way into her bones and skating over the surfaces of her wings, not a quiet child asking to be let outside, please, but a raging army of _itch_ that roars and shouts as it thunders over the ground.

She has gone in desperation to Kanti, who asked her—gently, almost too gently for her prickly childhood tutor, if there is any chance she has taken Jyuudai's get in the seven months since their marriage. This is one question she is able to answer in the negative with absolute certainty: no, there is no chance Jyuudai's child is growing in her womb. Even if the half of her that is no longer human didn't make conceiving almost impossible, carrying her husband's heir would have required that he take his privilege of her at least once. Jyuudai has not raised the issue, though, and Yubel has not gone out of her way to encourage him. She will do her duty when he asks it of her, if he should ask it; she loves him, and will not leave him wanting. She will succeed in at least one of the tasks of marriage that has been set to her. But she will not suggest that it be completed until Jyuudai indicates it should be.

Her reluctance has nothing to do with Jyuudai and everything to do with herself or, more precisely, with the new body she has finally become mobile enough to actually examine. She has long known it to be lopsided and unsymmetrical. This by itself did not bother her, at least in part because Jyuudai seems fascinated by the shape that lets her throw the dirken and shoot the bow with far more ease than she showed in their childhood lessons. But Jyuudai has not seen her fully unclothed since the day of her transformation, and there are things she knows about this new form that he does not. According to Xaquirah she has nothing to find alarming, but to Yubel's own admittedly inexperienced eye (aided by a mirror and a bed to hold onto, lest her wings tumble her head over heels), everything between her waist and knees has reverted to something like childhood. A frantic search of the few texts pertaining to dragons in the royal library turned up nothing useful, and so she has simply taken to undressing and curling quickly into her nest while Jyuudai is otherwise distracted. This is a kind of deformity she does not want him to see any sooner than she must.

But "any sooner than she must" might, she now knows, be far sooner than she thinks herself ready for, and now, standing on an open castle walkway and feeling the wind blowing through her hair, she wonders how she will explain to her husband that certain parts of her—certain rather significant parts, where married life and childbearing are concerned—are no longer human. She wonders if this will be the reason he finally sends her away. And she wonders which god or gods she has angered so badly that Xaquirah's proclamation on her current condition . . .

She turns away from the startling drop that overlooks the forest beyond Delain and slides down the wall back-to, wishing she dared to simply fling herself over the edge and fly in broad daylight. But though Jyuudai has utterly banished her for the day—he plans to hunt with his father only, he has said, and he believes his father's protection adequate for a few hours—she dares not leave the castle, never knowing when he'll return. And so she sits here, back against the wall of the stone walkway, feeling more trapped than she has since her engagement. According to Xaquirah, her problem is simple. How she wishes she could put him in her place and then have him tell her the same.

She is having a heat.

Yubel lets her head fall back so she can look up into the sky, starting to streak and run like an overturned painter's-tray, light blue being replaced by indigo and purple and orange and red all mixed. The tingle she could only identify as an itch, Xaquirah has said, is nature's call to mate. Yubel hisses discontentedly; there are many parts of her humanity that she does not mind having given up for Jyuudai's sake, including her ability to lie with a man or, indeed, her ability to refuse the same—but having it forced on her, not through her human side but the other—

There is a call in the courtyard, and the itch—mostly absent throughout the day, while she and Jyuudai have been separate—begins to creep back over her hands and arms. Yubel pushes herself off the side of the wall; the King and his son her husband have returned, and it is her duty to greet them.

And then try to extract herself from this incredible mess without dragging Jyuudai into it, too.

* * *

Jyuudai retires early; Yubel has not even finished her soup before he announces himself worn from his ride and ready for bed. She moves to stand, putting down her wine, and he puts a hand on her shoulder.

"You eat," he says, and bends to kiss her cheek. "I think I'll be okay for an hour."

Yubel nods, touches his cheek as he pulls away. He smiles. She tries to smile back and cannot, trapped in an expression of solemnity by the maddening, tingling itch, now so strong as to be almost painful, that rises up like a tidal wave on the beach the moment he touches her. Jyuudai either does not notice or chooses not to comment, instead taking his leave while Yubel tries to bolt through the rest of her food as quickly as possible. There are guards all through the castle and the massive front doors are bolted, but Yubel is still uncomfortable leaving Jyuudai alone.

At last she finishes and hurries through the palace, distinctly unhappy about how long it took her to get through her food without being ill and worrying in some back corner of her mind about how long Jyuudai has been completely alone. Yubel does not make a habit of leaving him that way unless he asks it, and over an hour, never.

She finds him in their room, bathed and in clean clothes—but not nightclothes, and this, combined with the hurt lurking far back in his eyes, is enough to frighten her.

"Jyuudai?"

"When were you going to tell me?" he asks, and Yubel stares. Then she remembers the door still standing open behind her, and closes and latches it. There is something about the clothing Jyuudai is wearing that bothers her, and the tingling itch settling behind her eyes has nothing to do with it—she doesn't think.

"I don't know what you mean."

"I talked to Xaquirah this afternoon."

The breath Yubel takes in is sharp, and it burns. Jyuudai stands up, and then she is able to place that oddity in his clothing: the overcloak he is wearing is the one he wore on their wedding day, one she has not seen in the sevenmonth since. She forces her shoulders straight. A simple clothing choice should not be a threat, especially coming from Jyuudai, and she will not allow the inhuman side of her mind to see it as one. Instead she steps into the room, forcing herself to meet his eyes.

"It's—"

"It's what?" Jyuudai interrupts, and the mixed anger and hurt Yubel hears in his voice is enough to make her flinch. "It's nothing I need to worry about? It's something you'll take care of? In case you haven't noticed, we're _married_."

Yubel drops her gaze to the floor. She's noticed, yes, certainly; the way the palace servants have taken to calling her "your highness" might have been something of a hint. When Jyuudai speaks again his voice is gentler, although he stays just outside the physical distance that will take the tingle in her skin from merely irritating to outright maddening.

"_Bensarat chanti,_" he says, and it's enough for Yubel to look up at him again: my soul is my love's. Part of the wedding vows they exchanged just over half a year ago. "I didn't make you those promises because I planned to break them, Yubel. If you needed my help, all you had to do was say so."

Yubel shakes her head, either not able or not willing to tell him why; even she is no longer sure. Jyuudai reaches out, bridging the space between them, and takes her hands. The tingle in her skin rises to a scream. He raises her hand to his lips and kisses the back. Yubel moans, sure someone has made a mistake somewhere; there is no reason for her hands to be so sensitive, especially not when they are buried beneath layers of scales.

Then the scream that is the tingle in her skin abates to a whisper.

Jyuudai's eyes are kind when her own meet them, and she takes a step away from the door. Jyuudai tugs gently on her hands. She lets him draw her forward, first into the room and then up to the bed. He reaches up and strokes the side of her face. She shivers and pulls away. Jyuudai looks down, then sits on the edge of the bed and pats the space beside him with one hand in a manner Yubel finds almost heartbreakingly familiar: it is the way he once asked her to sit on his own one-person bed in the little room he called his, now far away in the east tower of the castle. She sits, folding one wing back so she can see and folding the other around herself. When Jyuudai speaks, he looks out, as though sparing either himself or her or both the awkwardness of having this conversation face-to-face.

"Kanti said dragons have to mate for a heat to end."

"That's what I read in the library." Yubel wishes she did not have to go to the bucket in the corner for water. She isn't thirsty, exactly, but her lips feel too dry. She does not want to be having this conversation at this moment in this room. She wants to stretch her wings without knocking things about, wants to throw herself from the highest tower on the castle and glide off under a silvered moon to watch the light play off the river far below.

She doesn't mind lying with her husband—it is her duty and while she was human, at least, it was a pleasure—but she does not want to be forced into it by some kind of draconian internal clock.

Jyuudai reaches for her hand and squeezes it. "I wasn't going to say anything until you weren't still hurting all the time," he says, and Yubel very nearly cries. It is not a requirement of the law that a Dailish man take his wife's views into account where matters of privilege are concerned, although it's a matter of custom that not doing so is in low taste. But that any man would wait, possibly for years, over something as trifling as the dull and lingering pains in her arms and legs—this is an idea far beyond that of taking a view into account. Jyuudai reaches up with his other hand to stroke her face again.

"Would this be any easier for you if I told you that's the only reason I waited to ask?" he asks, and Yubel lets out a breath she didn't even know she was holding. Her wings twitch, and she closes her eyes, not entirely sure if she's being resigned or relieved.

"Some."

She feels his fingers flutter over her face and opens her eyes to see him looking up at her expectantly. Then she looks around the room.

"Not here."

Jyuudai stands without a word, accepting without question that their as yet unused marriage bed is not the place she wants to take a mate. Yubel follows his suit without the slightest idea why she should want to go elsewhere, or even where "elsewhere" might be. Instead she lets instinct lead her, first to an unbarred side door and then out, pulling Jyuudai into her arms to glide into the valley below. Somehow—almost as though her body and mind have communicated as one—holding him so close to herself does not trigger the expected cacophony of tingling, itching, maddening sensation just below the surface of her skin.

She lands near the clear pool that the pair of them frequented before her transformation, watching the moon on the water as Jyuudai relaxes in her arms after the flight that to her is a nothing and to him is both unusual and unnatural.

"Here?" he murmurs, his voice low, as though not wanting to disturb the night around them. Yubel shakes her head and picks her way across the rocks at the bottom of the waterfall that feeds the pool, a thin sheet of water that just masks a place she knows well. She sits, then flexes her wings outward, and a hole appears in what seemed to be solid rock.

"Here."

Jyuudai climbs in beneath her wing, tossing his cloak onto a stool in the rather spacious cave they once made a playhouse of and reaching out for a candle to light. In rainy seasons it can be a dangerous place, for if the pool floods the cave will also, but such a flooding has not occurred in close to a decade, and it hardly seems a worry tonight, when the sky is so bright that every constellation from The Lovers to The Fool is visible—even the brilliant pink and yellow stars near the tip of The Tower that some sorcerers have suggested are not stars at all, but other worlds altogether. Yubel follows him, and in the flame of the candle he has lit from his flint she traces the lines of his face and body with her eyes.

Many of the things they once played with here are gone, and so there are no blankets or pillows stored from nights of stargazing and hunting for falling-stars, but there is still a woven mat on the stone floor of the cave, and after a look around Jyuudai spreads his cloak over it and sits. Yubel sits alongside him, breathing deeply of the air and knowing without knowing how she knows it that here, now, is the right choice.

Jyuudai reaches out and unbuckles the harness she has made herself from old tack, then sets it on the small table the two of them built here as children. The knives in it make an unmusical jingle against the scarred wood. Then he reaches for the cunning rawhide weave that holds her shirt together at the shoulders and draws it. Yubel flinches back—she knows what is beneath the shirt—and Jyuudai reaches out a hand to stop her.

The areola on her single human breast is dark, almost the shade of the finer scales above her eyes and lining her neck, and the scales here are so thin as to be translucent. If Jyuudai looks—and he will, because he is Jyuudai, and therefore curious, this much she knows—he will be able to see the veins beneath the surface that her human body did not show.

He reaches out a hand—to touch that small part of her that is still mostly human, she thinks—and then, against her expectations, presses it against the thick pad of scale and muscle over her heart. She quivers. He drags his fingers down her chest to her stomach and shifts his weight to sit closer to her, then reaches for the edge of his own tunic and pulls it off in a single fluid motion. She reaches out with her own hand to return the caress, and is embarrassed to realise she is shaking. Jyuudai gets to his knees to make the pair of them of a height and slides his arms around her, kisses her cheek, whispers a quiet "I love you" into her ear, and the part of her that obeys the urge to fly when the wind gusts first presses against him, then flares her wings out and back even as the human part of her realises Jyuudai has no way to answer her call to mate and that she must find some way to communicate this to herself.

He holds up his arms—not out, as though in embrace, but _up_, as though they are themselves wings.

Yubel lets out a hiss she wishes she could explain to him and puts her palms against the mat on the floor, bowing her head, stretching her back, and letting her wings flare out perfectly flat against her back and down to the floor, as though she is crouched and waiting for prey. Jyuudai kicks off the walking-shoes he slipped on for this excursion and slides out of the short-pants beneath his tunic, pausing only a moment to undo the laces at his knees and turn a pocket back the right way before running a single hand over the back of her wing as he steps over its edge. She arches her back downward, letting out a loud keen at a teasing touch on skin that is over-sensitive even without the tingle in her skin.

Jyuudai kneels behind her, rubs the heel of his hand over the space between her wings, pulls himself to his knees, and puts his hands on her shoulders. She can feel oil on one of them, but before she can try to pull herself together enough to ask what it is there for he is inside of her, and the slick substance on his fingers is important only because she is larger than he and its presence is impeding the grasp keeping him steady.

He moves, and she makes another of those loud keening noises as the tingle in her skin grows into a sensation that almost burns as it tears through her and then departs, leaving only a single thought behind it: _mine._

He is hers and she is his, he has claimed her with his body and she has claimed him in her heart, and when he gains his balance enough to lean forward and kiss the back of her neck she makes a noise so loud it could almost be mistaken for a wail.

They join. They join and are one, and at their peak Jyuudai whispers in her ear again:

_Bensarat chanti._

* * *

The first thing Yubel is aware of is a deep and contented peace within herself, as though the tingle beneath her skin for the past fortnight were a hive of bees that has fallen to sleeping for the winter. The next is that Jyuudai is snuggled against her chest, held there by his arms around her waist and her wings around his back, covering a body that is as bare as her own.

The next is that the sun is in her eyes, and she draws away from it with a hiss that cannot quite bring itself to be irritated. Jyuudai stirs, murmurs a short string of nonsense syllables in a soft and most certainly not conscious kind of tone, and then settles back with his head tucked beneath her chin. Yubel reaches up with her free hand to stroke his hair.

Her husband. Her lover. Her mate. Her _Jyuudai_, all of these and more. The syllables turn over in her head in a musical kind of sequence that fills her with a joy she does not know how to speak, and so she simply rubs her cheek against the top of his head, purring and realising even as she hears the noise coming out of her own chest that nobody ever told her dragons could purr.

Eventually she hears a sleepy kind of sound from the general direction of her chest, and then Jyuudai shifts in her arms. Yubel unfolds her wings enough to let him move, though not enough for a sudden movement to send him tumbling to the twillseed cloak beneath them.

"We're here?" he asks, sounding rather foolish. Yubel strokes his back, much as he stroked hers the night before while she shook in his arms after their joining, and she purrs even as she answers. He smiles up at her, and she thinks she sees in his smile the answer to the gratitude she cannot express in words and must speak instead with her eyes.

"Yes."

Jyuudai sits up, moving to one side as he does to keep from sitting on her wing. Yubel joins him, and he presses against her side, cuddling in between her side and her wing. She reaches for his hand, enjoying the touch and the feel of his bare skin against her.

"What time is it?"

"Late," she says. "The sun's up." Today she doesn't think she could care if someone made her, but she must be honest.

"Do you think they have a search party out by now?"

"I doubt it. Your things are gone and we left the room open," she points out, and he nods against her shoulder.

"Do you think we have to go back right now?"

"Within the next hour, probably," she tells him. It's impossible to gauge the sun's angle through a sheet of constantly-moving water, but she puts the time at late morning—the eighth or perhaps even the ninth hour on the sundial. Jyuudai smiles up at her.

"Do you think we have time to go swimming?"

Yubel ponders the idea of leaving the cave, where it is warm if slightly dark, and throwing herself into the cool water beyond it. The thought does not appeal.

Then she thinks of being with Jyuudai in that water and spending half an hour being alone together, laughing, holding, touching, playing . . . being lovers, being _mates._

She smiles.

"I think so."


End file.
